ABSTRACT
Talcott Parsons' assessment provided N. J. Smelser with an important legacy. In the introduction to his 1988 edited volume of major sociological fields, Smelser covered the main points of his former mentor's 1959 evaluation, and then indicated some major challenges that he saw facing the profession thirty years later. The 'new era' of the twenty-first century will indubitably continue to display the advances in technology and science that have been the distinctive features of 'modernity'. Sensitive to a feeling of malaise and fragmentation pervasive in sociology, one that relates to their functional identity in late modernity, Donald Levine makes direct use of vision' in seeking to recapture the identity of sociology. Yet another set of large-scale surprises to be cited are the enormous socio-political ruptures, the major surprises, that have taken place in Europe in barely one generation, mostly with minimal violence, but also with maximum violence.
